


Atrophy

by picnokinesis



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Introspection, Memories, Not A Fix-It, Soul Stone Weirdness, especially amongst self-sacrificial assassins, probably the shortest thing I'll ever post here ever but here we are, the inevitability of death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-02-28 04:53:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18749392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/picnokinesis/pseuds/picnokinesis
Summary: I’m bound to your bedside, your eulogy singer





	Atrophy

_I’m bound to your bedside, your eulogy singer_

 

 

In the moment that stretches on between her broken body seared into his retinas and his eyes opening to the raging sky, he  _dreams._  Memories flicker past, non-chronological - a turbulent river of moments he has lived, moments he has forgotten, moments that have shaped him more than he realises. The sound of shouting and shattering glass when his dad knocks his sixth beer bottle off the table. The smell of canvas tents and mud and straw. The feeling of blood seeping through aching wounds, of bandages wrapped tightly over broken skin. The dark red of her hair against white pillows. The sound of bowstrings straining, of arrows whistling past his face and  _thudding_  when they hit home, buried into a target or someone’s chest. The smell of SHIELD’s infirmary. The taste of iron in his mouth as he spits blood onto the Berlin tarmac and lets himself be taken into custody. The rough grit of rubble and dust on his hands. It’s after all this and so much more, flowing past him faster than he can comprehend, that he realises what is happening. The stone is examining him, interrogating everything he is. It’s looking at his  _soul._

Somehow, he catches hold of a memory and  _lingers_. He stands by her bedside - it was after mission gone wrong, he doesn’t remember when. Manila, maybe? Definitely after Budapest. Her skin is pale like the sheets she’s wrapped in, but the doctors told him that she’s stubborn, a fighter. That she’s going to pull through. The part of him in the memory realises how close he came to losing her, and the part of him that is reliving this wonders if he always knew it would come down to this - to her making the sacrifice play and leaving him behind to try and explain her life, condense a person that defies words into a fleeting eulogy that he stutters through with a choked throat; a stilted soliloquy that no-one can follow. Not even him. 

 

He wonders if he knew then that he was always going to lose her. 

 

 

_Someone, oh anyone, tell me how to stop this_  
_She’s screaming, expiring, and I’m her only witness_  
_I'm freezing, infected, and rigid in that room inside her_  
_No one’s going to come as long as I lay still in bed beside her_

**Author's Note:**

> The lyrics come from the song Atrophy by The Antlers. I might expand on this or fit it into something else at some point, but for now, here it is *ironic jazz hands*. Hope you like it!
> 
> Come and yell at me on tumblr, I'm picnokinesis!


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